“Be it ever so humble,” Luchóg said.
I looked far ahead and saw bustling activity. From the back of a station wagon, a woman unloaded packages tied up with bows. Two boys tossed a football. A yellow car, shaped like a bug, chugged up a winding road. We could hear a radio talking about the Army-Navy game, and a man muttering curses as he nailed a string of lights beneath the eaves of his roof. Mesmerized by all I saw, I failed to notice as day gave way to night. Lights went on in the homes, as if on sudden signal.
“Shall we see who lives on the ring?” Luchóg asked.
We crept down to the circle of asphalt. Two of the homes appeared empty. The other three showed signs of life: cars in the driveways, lamplit figures crossing behind the windows as if rushing off on vital tasks. Glancing in each window, we saw the same story unfolding. A woman in a kitchen stirred something in a pot. Another lifted a huge bird from the oven, while in an adjoining room a man stared at minuscule figures playing games in a glowing box, his face flushed in excitement or anger. His next-door neighbor slept in an easy chair, oblivious to the noise and flickering images.
“He looks familiar,” I whispered.
Covered to his toes in blue terrycloth, a young child sat in a small cage in the corner of the room. He played distractedly with brightly colored plastic toys. For a moment, I thought the sleeping man resembled my father, but I could not understand how he could have another son. A woman walked from one room into the other, and her long blonde hair trailed behind like a tail. She scrunched up her mouth into a bow before bending down and whispering something to the man, a name perhaps, and he looked startled and slightly embarrassed to be caught sleeping. When his eyes popped open, he looked even more like my father, but she was definitely not my mother. She flashed a crooked smile and lifted her baby over the bars, and the child cooed and laughed and threw his arms around his mother’s neck. I had heard that sound before. The man switched off the console, but before joining the others, he came to the window, cleared a circle with his two hands against the damp panes, and peered out into the darkness. I do not think he saw us, but I surely had seen him before.
We circled back into the woods and waited until the moon was high in the night sky and most of the lights popped off goodnight. The houses in the ring were dark and quiet.
“I don’t like this,” I said, my breath visible in the violet light.
“You worry your own life away like a kitten worries a string,” Smaolach said.
He barked, and we followed him down to the cul-de-sac. Smaolach chose a house with no car in the driveway, where we were not likely to encounter any humans. Careful not to wake anyone, we slipped inside easily through the unlocked front door. A neat row of shoes stood off to the side of the foyer, and Luchóg immediately tried on pairs until he found a fit. Their boy would be dismayed in the morning. The kitchen lay in sight of the foyer, through a smallish dining room. Each of us loaded a rucksack with canned fruits and vegetables, flour, salt, and sugar. Luchóg jammed fistfuls of tea bags into his trouser pockets and on the way out copped a package of cigarettes and a box of matches from the sideboard. In and out in minutes, disturbing no one.
The second house—where the baby in blue lived—proved stubborn. All of the doors and downstairs windows were locked, so we had to shimmy under the crawlspace and into a closetlike room that sheltered a maze of plumbing. By following the pipes, we eventually made our way into the interior of the house, ending up in the cellar. To make ourselves quieter, we took off our shoes and tied them around our necks before sneaking up the steps and slowly opening the door to the kitchen. The room smelled of remembered bread.